ReadWriteWeb

A post last week on pimping your LinkedIn profile drew a big response and led to a divide in comments about whether people should be using LinkedIn.

One of the bigger misconceptions in the comments was that LinkedIn is primarily a job-hunting site. But there are reasons to use LinkedIn even if you have a job you love, aside from the obvious benefits of keeping up on your industry and making connections with potential business partners.

Several years ago, I spoke on a panel at an advertising industry conference with Om Malik and Michael Arrington. Arrington, my former employer, was bored by the conversation and mocked me throughout it. One of the last questions we were asked on the panel was what technology we were most excited about at the time. I said I was most excited by trends represented by a little startup called Rapportive, which sits in your Gmail sidebar and shows you aggregated information about whoever you are emailing.

Arrington laughed at me, just like he had laughed at me in the conference green room when I showed people photos on my phone of the chickens I was raising in my backyard. Just as I was vindicated when the TV show Portlandia later demonstrated that it is perfectly reasonable to raise chickens here in my home town, so too do I feel a little vindicated by the reported acquisition in the works of Rapportive by social network LinkedIn. OK, so both are a little silly. But the point is: Rapportive is awesome and I was right.

AllThingsD's Liz Gannes has sources telling her that Rapportive, the best thing that ever happened to email, has been acquired by LinkedIn. We've heard the scuttlebutt, too. Our friends at LinkedIn won't say a word. Rapportive co-founder Martin Kleppmann "can't comment," and CEO Rahul Vohra has been quiet on Twitter lately. That's all we know.

So we aren't reporting that it has happened, but we're bracing ourselves in case it does. Since Rapportive is the most useful plug-in ever, we're concerned about something bad happening to it. But if it had to be somebody, an acquisition by LinkedIn could be a good choice.

I like using Twitter. I tolerate Facebook because I have to. And I'm on Google+ because everyone says I should be.

So that has left little time to give love to my profile on LinkedIn, which is, depending on how you look at it, either the biggest niche social network or the smallest of the big, all-encompassing social networks. Some people will tell you that sooner or later, all of our networking, social and professional, will be centrally located on Facebook. Others will insist that you need a LinkedIn profile, if only to protect the eyes of potential employers from falling on photos of you wearing an ugly shirt and a stupid grin at last year's company cookout.

If you aren't happy with scheduling your Tweets and analyzing the sentiment of your social networking accounts, a new service from Gremln.com is available today that might be a better alternative. The company has been part of the St. Louis-based Capital Innovators startup accelerator/incubator program that we wrote about yesterday.

LinkedIn has been making heavy use of Apache Hadoop and Pig with its People You May Know and skills features (among others), and has pulled together a lot of User Defined Functions (UDFs) for Pig in the process.

On January 10th, LinkedIn's Matthew Hayes announced the release of DataFu on the LinkedIn engineering blog. DataFu is available on GitHub under the Apache 2.0 license. DataFu is a collection of UDFs that LinkedIn has developed for data mining and statistics.

A new report by Jeremiah Owyang out last week describes the growing proliferation of social media across corporations and shows exactly how out of control things have gotten. Owyang, an expert on the topic who is part of the Altimeter Group, has a lot to absorb here. He surveyed 144 corporations using social media along with 27 software vendors who have various management tools to help. One of the nice things about this report is he lists his sources explicitly, so you know the quality of the information. On average, a company has 178 different corporate accounts on various social networks. And that isn't counting the personal accounts. That is a lot of stuff to manage.

Several of the largest Interent firms - including Google, Facebook and Twitter - are backing alternate legislation being proposed to the Stop Online Piracy and Protect IP Acts.

The OPEN act sponsored by Rep. Darrell Issa, R-Calif., and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., would allow the International Trade Commission to order online ad networks and payment processors to sever ties withe foreign websites that are targeted by patent infringement claims.

SOPA, and its Senate counerpart, PIPA, on the other hand, would force search engines and websites to block links to sites that are listed as being "dedicated" to copyright infringement. SOPA has been widely endorsed by traditional media companies, but Web firms and free speech advocates have likened it to government-enforced censorship.

This year was another huge one for the Web and the companies, technologies and individuals that make things happen on it. We saw groundbreaking new devices unveiled, key companies go public, a few tech fumbles and we lost some visionaries.

Narrowing down the ten biggest Web news stories of 2011 was no easy task. Lots of stories had a massive impact. Some of them fit into a larger, ongoing trend, while many are singular, important events. Some stories broke to extensive attention and fanfare, only to see their significance fizzle out within a few weeks. We've painstakingly whittled down ten of the biggest stories of the year and rounded them up for you here.

Today professional network LinkedIn released its top most shared stories. There are currently 130 million professionals on LinkedIn, and the most popular shared articles are about how to be a better worker. The number two and number three most shared stories were about Steve Jobs. The number nine most shared article was about how people look at your Facebook profile, and the number one article was written by digital marketer Ilya Pozin for Inc. magazine; it is called "9 Things That Motivate Employees More Than Money." So who are these LinkedIn users, anyhow?